Sandra’s Miscellany

When the Bombshell line was first announced to the romance writing community at large, eager writers jumped on the idea of creating a powerful Alpha female — but perhaps jumped too hard. Word from the editorial staff came back that they were seeing too many automaton heroines, too many weak men, and too-cartoonish plots.

That’s to be expected — after all, this was our first publisher-generated chance to write about women we’d love to see on the page. Maybe we were a little exuberant about all the possibilities suddenly available to us.

But now that the line is settling into its stride, we can look at all the heroines that have filled the line’s first year and see who they are. Some interesting characteristics of the Bombshell heroine:

• She’s not a bitch.
• She’s neither overly emotional nor completely shut down emotionally.
• She’s more likely to feint than faint.
• Her confidence rarely strays into outright arrogance (unless this is one of her character flaws).

When we talk about crafting sympathetic heroines, we’re talking about creating women whom the reader can identify with. That identification can’t really come from external events or actions — just how many spies are running around out there reading our books?

The identification comes from the emotional, which we all have in common. And there are many ways to elicit sympathy from the reader with an action/adventure heroine:

• Put at stake the life of someone she loves.
• Threaten her trust in those around her.
• Let her feel doubt in her decisions or abilities.
• Allow her to feel alone.

And I’m sure you can think of plenty more ways. But the common thread among these techniques is that the vast majority of readers will have felt these same things at some point in their lives. When we tap into the common experience, our heroine becomes more sympathetic.

Some things that make a heroine unsympathetic:

• She’s perfect.
• She lacks emotional vulnerability.
• She does things that aren’t noble, or that cause the reader to think less of her.

Let’s look at these problems in a little more detail:

She’s perfect.

Perfect people are rarely interesting because they have nowhere to grow. There’s nothing they need to learn, no Achilles heel to battle against, no struggle to figure out the best, right decision. So who cares?

Give a heroine a flaw and have the external plot constantly hammer against that flaw, and you’ve got a story where the heroine is forced to grow whether she wants to or not. This is powerful storytelling, especially when coupled with a lose-lose situation in the dark moment.

She lacks emotional vulnerability.

This is the automaton effect. An invulnerable heroine can be perceived as anything from cocky to downright annoying. True, some readers enjoy an all-out bitch, but that’s a cerebral pleasure. If the heroine is constantly holding the people around her at arm’s length with her bitchiness — and by extension, the reader at arm’s length — then she’s likely not going to be someone the reader roots for.

One way to generate emotional vulnerability is to allow her to feel doubt in herself or what she’s doing. Let her wrestle with the ethics of the situation she finds herself in. Or let her wonder if she can ever really have want she wants even while she’s doing her duty. A great example of this is Evelyn Vaughn’s Maggi Sanger in AKA GODDESS and HER KIND OF TROUBLE.

In other words, put the heroine’s heart — as well as her life — on the line.

She does things that aren’t noble, or that cause the reader to think less of her.

This one can be tricky, because in some cases we want her to do something ignoble — so give her a really, really good reason to do it, like have her blackmailed or chased into a corner where she has no choice but to do this loathsome thing. Think of Judith Leon’s CODE NAME: DOVE. Nova Blair did something many would think ignoble — sleeping with a married man — but because by doing so she’s serving her country, most readers can work with that.

Crafting the successful Bombshell heroine isn’t rocket science, but neither is it particularly easy. We have special challenges in our work because we’re venturing into uncharted territory. But what is writing if it isn’t experimentation?

Full steam ahead!